Chapter 40
Ji Sang-wook got hit by a pebble seven times.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t seriously injured.
His forehead and nose were broken, blood streaming down his face, and both eyes were so swollen he could barely see. That was about it.
Even an idiot like him was still human, apparently. That was the only reason he’d gotten away with it in one piece.
If it had been a skeleton or one of the Followers of the Demon Race, a single pebble would have been enough to leave him with a fatal wound, or worse, erase him from existence altogether.
Even after being pelted like that, the bastard hadn’t lost his nerve. He glared at me like he wanted to kill me on the spot.
I ignored him and checked where the pebble had fallen to the floor.
I planned to pick it up later.
It was a pebble imbued with Saessak’s mana, so there was no doubt it could be used for something impressive.
“Gah! Fight properly! Fight properly, you son of a bitch!”
He was barely breathing through his nose, and yet he was still yelling his head off. It was ridiculous.
I shrugged at him as if I were the one who’d been caught off guard.
“Properly? I thought we were just warming up.”
“Y-you son of a-!”
Bang!
Trying to vent his rage, he smashed the floor with his giant double-edged battleaxe.
The ground caved in deeply, so the force behind it was certainly real.
But... was that guy really a B-class hunter? Not C-class?
The thought crossed my mind.
He swung that double-edged axe far too slowly.
I had no idea how someone that sluggish could hunt Red Manticores.
He might manage to take down one here and there, but soloing Hallasan Gate, where they lived in packs, would be difficult.
A winged manticore could just take off into the air if things got ugly.
“You bastard! Done fooling around?”
Ji Sang-wook shouted as he wrenched the lid off a healing potion.
He gulped it down, then, as if he wanted to cool himself off, poured the rest over his head.
After that, he flung the bottle to the floor.
Unlike the smashed empty bottle, his injured face began recovering at a sluggish pace.
Feeling his body mend, he raised the double-edged axe and came at me.
“You’re the one wasting a healing potion on fooling around. That supposed to be your argument?”
“Y-you die!”
“Huh. You planning to kill me?”
I wasn’t an idiot. If he killed me, then what?
Right now, this could still end as a mere scuffle.
The Association wouldn’t want to go around talking about an ugly incident at the Tower of Trials, either, so they’d probably prefer to settle it quietly.
But if he actually killed me, then it wouldn’t end as a scuffle anymore.
At best, it would become assault and murder, his hunter license revoked and the whole thing ending with him in prison.
And even then, my little sister and my friend would no doubt move heaven and earth to make sure he experienced the worst pain possible.
“Shut up!”
Whether he knew it or not, Ji Sang-wook kept swinging that double-edged axe.
Since he was just wildly flailing a huge weapon around, it was easy to avoid.
Every swing telegraphed exactly where it was headed.
I could probably do more than dodge, too. I could counter.
But I didn’t.
Dodging was more fun.
Like a child learning a game he’d never played before, I slipped away from his fierce attacks with ease.
“Swish.”
“Here.”
“Swish!”
“No, here.”
“Stop moving!”
I drifted in closer while avoiding the axe as it cut diagonally through the air.
Then I jabbed my index finger, the one not using Warm Touch, right into his waist.
“Uhng!” he let out a strange noise.
It was deeply moving, honestly, to be able to evade a B-class hunter’s attacks with such ease.
If it had been before Pruning, I wouldn’t have been able to dodge that axe at all.
Back then, I would have probably used bark to make his attacks ineffective, then counterattacked, or thrown myself at him like a moth to a flame even if it meant getting hurt.
That was how I’d always fought until now.
“Huff, huff!”
With every swing of the double-edged axe, Ji Sang-wook’s breathing grew harsher and rougher.
Once again, I was reminded just how monstrous Pruning really was.
It was definitely a horrifying experience I never wanted to go through again.
Still, seeing my body move this smoothly made me think regenerating my limbs had been worth it.
Of course, that didn’t mean I intended to forgive Dishing for not warning me in advance.
My vow to curse that man every night was still very much in force.
Even now, hatred for him kept rising up from the deepest part of my heart.
“You rat bastard! Are you only going to dodge?”
“Dodging alone seems like enough, judging by how hard you’re panting.”
At that, Ji Sang-wook made a wide swing with the axe.
It didn’t look like he intended to cut me down so much as force me back and open some distance.
I stepped away and watched to see what he planned to do.
He must have wanted space for something, which was why he’d backed off.
He reached into the magic pouch at his waist and pulled out a round vial.
The opaque glass bottle held a sinister-looking purple liquid, sloshing within.
Poison? Was that all he meant to do, splash poison around?
Then he popped the cap off and swallowed it.
The purple liquid rushed down his throat.
There was only one kind of potion worth drinking in a situation like this.
It had to be a buff potion.
Only then did I understand how he’d soloed Hallasan Gate with that level of skill.
Watching his eyes turn purple, I deliberately frowned.
“So you were a junkie?”
“....”
Really, I was calling him that as an insult just to piss him off.
I didn’t think badly of people who used buff potions.
Unlike steroids, they were pure potions with no side effects, and even the government recognized them as legal, so who was I to judge?
I’d never considered buying them myself, since they were so absurdly expensive it felt like the tail was bigger than the dog, but I did think of them as useful consumables that could make up for lacking physical ability.
The people who looked down on them only did so because the strength wasn’t pure.
But if they hated that, then they shouldn’t be taking buffs from mages or equipping magic items that raised their stats, either.
“You can only stay calm for so long.”
With that, Ji Sang-wook bit his lower lip.
He probably hadn’t intended to show himself doping where a camera could catch him.
Hm. Seeing him angered, but now calm enough to control it, meant he clearly wasn’t planning to play around anymore.
Maybe he’d gotten one and a half times stronger?
I pulled Arca out of the magic pouch at my waist and slung it over my shoulder.
At the sight of the huge blade, Ji Sang-wook sneered at me.
“A wooden sword? What are you planning to do with that?”
Arca was made of wood, so I could understand why he’d laugh.
He probably didn’t even know that wood came from the World Tree.
“This isn’t a sword.”
“What?”
After hearing me, he narrowed one eye.
He didn’t understand what I meant by not a sword.
It certainly looked like a greatsword from where he stood.
I had thought the same thing about Arca before Yu Jae-i explained it to me.
“This one’s name is Arbor capulus.”
“Arb... what?”
“It means sword hilt.”
“A sword hilt? What the hell are you talk-”
“The biggest sword hilt in the world...!”
I poured mana into it.
Arca released a blue blade.
Ji Sang-wook stared blankly at it, mouth hanging open.
The blade, which stood nearly three stories high if you measured its height, was intimidating just to look at.
Empowered by his buff, Ji Sang-wook rushed me again.
High on the sense that he could do anything now, he shook off the pressure.
Compared to before, his double-edged axe came screaming toward me with speed that was almost unrecognizable.
“...You bastard!”
Even so, I could still avoid his attacks with ease.
I didn’t move at all while facing a Ji Sang-wook who’d become two or three times faster and stronger from doping.
The reason I could do that was simple: I was holding Arca.
The passive effect of the Manager of the World Tree skill had activated, increasing my physical abilities whenever I held an item related to the World Tree.
Before Pruning, I hadn’t felt much of a boost even when my physical stats went up.
Now I could definitely feel my body had improved.
“Why! Why can’t I hit you!”
Ji Sang-wook screamed in agony at the fact that even after doping, he still couldn’t force his way into Arca's range.
Then Arca's blue blade touched his neck.
He let out a high-pitched yelp and took a step back.
“You done?”
“...I lost! I lost, okay? So please, just put that thing away!”
“Good. Nice to see you using your head.”
He set down his double-edged axe and admitted defeat obediently.
I’d thought he’d keep throwing a tantrum and insisting he hadn’t lost yet, but he gave up far more quickly than I expected.
Then Ji Sang-wook’s eyes suddenly went wide, and he pointed past me with one finger.
What was that look, like he’d just seen something he wished he could unsee?
“That, that!”
“....!”
What appeared behind me was as big as an apartment complex building.
An A-rank one-eyed monster, a Cyclops.
Same A-rank, same single eye, but unlike a Watcher, who was dismissed as a glass cannon, this thing was on a completely different level.
There was no end to the hunters who’d been maimed and driven into retirement after being killed by that thing.
That was why it was called the Monster of Wailing.
So many A-rank hunters couldn’t kill one that they weren’t even treated like proper A-rank hunters.
“Why is that thing even-!”
Ji Sang-wook shouted, then cut himself off and looked at me.
He’d realized the Cyclops had appeared because of me.
The Tower of Trials had decided I could handle it.
The Cyclops, the Monster of Wailing to A-rank hunters.
“Me, fight that...?”
I looked up at the red-eyed Cyclops.
It lowered its single eye onto me, then swung the wooden club clutched in its right hand.
It was a simple arm movement, nothing more than a loosening-up exercise.
And yet, just like Arca, which had produced a blue blade, the giant wooden club slammed into the ground at a speed Ji Sang-wook’s axe couldn’t even come close to matching.
It detonated with a deafening boom, as if another bomb had gone off, and carved out a massive crater.
“You bastard!”
It immediately swung the wooden club at me again.
As if to say it had already finished the greeting with a single arm motion.
Could I really bring that thing down?
Before I even had time to wonder, the fight between me and the Cyclops began.
＊＊＊
Woo Chae-yeon knew Ji-on was moving away from her.
She assumed he was leaving because she hadn’t been able to control her mood and had ended up slaughtering monsters around her indiscriminately.
Just as she was about to go after him to apologize, she spotted a man already chasing after him.
“That man is definitely...”
She remembered that he was the one who had greeted her while she’d been sitting in the waiting line earlier.
From her years of experience, she instantly understood that he had gotten dragged into something troublesome because of her.
Feeling guilty, she was about to sweep the man aside, but then she saw Ji-on glance back at him from time to time and stopped herself.
Ji-on already knew the man was following him.
Even though she, too, had been called a genius and praised for her intuition, she hadn’t even noticed she was being tailed until now.
How was he detecting it, and how was he luring the man in?
She decided to watch Ji-on a little longer.
“...Incredible.”
As she kept watching him in silence, Chae-yeon let out an honest murmur of admiration.
He was fighting someone far weaker than himself with complete ease.
It was as if he were teaching the other man, step by step, that he had no chance of winning.
After a few minutes, admiration turned into shock.
“He’s blocking a Cyclops’s attack like that?”
Woo Chae-yeon remembered something her brother had said on the day she first met him: “He’s always surprising people.”
He kept giving her new reasons to be surprised.
Even the fact that what she’d taken for a greatsword was actually a sword hilt had been shocking.
But what astonished her even more was seeing him take on a Cyclops alone, a monster that had forced countless A-rank hunters into retirement.
Ji-on blocked the Cyclops’s attack, which had smashed the ground into a crater like a bomb going off, without taking a single point of damage.
Even after enduring such a tremendous impact, he immediately went on the offensive, charging in to counterattack.
Watching the back-and-forth struggle between Baek Do-woon and the Cyclops, neither one giving an inch, she found herself muttering the question before she realized it.
“Ji-on... What on earth is that person?”
Woo Chae-yeon couldn’t understand why someone with that kind of skill had remained unknown until now.
There was a man who was recognized by everyone just for having soloed Hallasan Gate.
And yet she had never once heard the name Ji-on before her brother mentioned it.
“There must be some reason.”
Curious, Woo Chae-yeon decided she would investigate who Ji-on really was.
What was unfortunate was that she still didn’t know his name was not Ji-on, but Baek Do-woon.